1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a portable terminal, and in particular a locking release device for a cover mounted on a housing of a portable terminal to protect a battery pack.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a portable terminal is an appliance carried by an individual user to allow the user to carry out voice communication with another user through one or more base stations or to use contents provided by service providers. Because such a portable terminal executes wireless transmission and reception, the user can enjoy voice communication or wireless Internet.
In early portable terminals, services provided through portable terminals were limited to voice communication, short message transmission, and the like. Recently, however, a banking service such as retail payment, a security service through home networking and the like have been enabled. In particular, multimedia services, such as downloading, reproducing and streaming services for sound and moving image files, have rapidly progressed.
In addition, as multimedia services are provided through portable terminals, the performance of portable terminals such as image-processing rate is continuously improved, and the mobile communication technology for transmitting information files of high capacity, such as moving image files, is also being continuously developed.
Meanwhile, as the integration densities of circuit devices have improved with the development in technology of fabricating portable terminals, portable terminals have been dramatically miniaturized. However, because large-sized display devices are increasingly required as the multimedia services are commercialized, only several kinds of components are miniaturized.
As miniaturization of portable terminals attend to difficulties associated with multimedia services as described above, efforts have recently concentrated on reducing the thicknesses of portable terminals to make the portable terminals as slim as possible.
A battery pack for a conventional portable terminal is configured by sealing a battery cell within a battery housing so that the battery pack can be directly mounted on or removed from the portable terminal. However, it is difficult to mount a battery pack on a slim portable terminal if the battery pack employs a battery housing for sealing a battery cell. That is, such a battery housing forms an obstacle in making a portable terminal slim. Furthermore, it is difficult to secure a solid construction for restraining such a battery pack in the mounted state on a terminal housing.
The weight of portable terminals is also increasingly reduced. However, in order to secure a sufficient battery capacity, there is a limit to reducing a battery cell's weights. As a result, the weight of a battery cell occupies a substantial part of the entire weight of a portable terminal. This also causes the battery cell to be released or fractured when an external impact is applied to the portable terminal.
In order to solve the above-mentioned problems, there has been proposed a construction in which a battery cell is received in the housing of a terminal and a cover is mounted on the portable terminal to protect the battery cell. Such a conventional cover for protecting a battery cell in a slim portable terminal has a construction adapted to be fixed to the terminal housing by placing the cover in close contact with the terminal housing and then linearly moving the cover by a predetermined section. With the construction for mounting such a cover through linear movement, although it is easy to mount the cover, it is inconvenient to remove the cover, because it is necessary for a user to linearly move the cover while compressing the cover in order to remove such a cover again.